Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/208

. It is not originally and by nature that I am good; on the contrary, my goodness must arise in my consciousness; it belongs to my spiritual world; the grace of God has its work here, but my co-operation as consciousness as my exercise of will is also necessarily involved. According to the prevalent view, my being good is a matter of my caprice and pleasure, for everything is posited through me.

In contemplating this remarkable contradiction in religious opinion, we have to recognise the fact that a tremendous revolution has taken place in the Christian world. An entirely new self-consciousness in reference to the True has appeared. All duty, all that is right, depends upon the innermost consciousness, upon the point of view of religious self-consciousness, springs from the root of the spirit, and this is the basis of all actuality. Yet it is only when it is the form for an objective content that the self-conscious spirit has truth. From this point of view, on the contrary, which has no content in it, no religion whatever is possible, for it is I who am the affirmative, while the Idea which has absolute Being must in religion be established purely through itself and not through me. Here, therefore, there can be no religion, any more than from the standpoint of sensuous consciousness.

Philosophy is in this connection regarded as something special. If general culture is given a place in consciousness, then philosophy is a special calling or business, a manner of regarding things which is outside of ordinary interests, it is a calling which has a special place of its own. And thus the Philosophy of Religion too, according to the prevalent view, is something which cannot have a meaning for society in general, but must rather expect to meet with opposition and enmity from every side.

If accordingly the first relation of the finite to the infinite was the natural and untrue one, because the multitude and multiplicity of particularity were held fast